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Automated Testing Comes To Facebook Connect

Facebook today announced an officially supported method of running Unit Tests against your Facebook Connect integrations by way of the 3rd party application Watir. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Unit Testing is a series of automated tests to ensure the functionality of your application remains intact, particularly after updating or changing your application code.

To date, there is no easy method to execute Unit Testing on the Facebook.com domain for formal Facebook applications due to the complexity of the site, session keys, and authentication procedures. As such, typical 3rd party test suites such as Selenium fail in these conditions. However, it is usually a given that website administrators can introduce Unit Testing on their own domains and web applications to ensure functionality. Now that the line is being blurred between traditional web app and Facebook application via Facebook Connect, it is important that website administrators have a formal, sanctioned way of testing their own domains.

If you’d like to get the automated tests setup and running on your Facebook Connect integrated site, stop by the Wiki article for a more detailed explanation and instructions. As mentioned above, you’ll need to install the 3rd party Watir test frame (written in Ruby) which is currently available for both IE and Firefox.